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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35637 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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I work with African 'elites' on a regular, sometimes daily basis, and many remind me more of Lao than they do the laborers.

Yeah, this resonates with me; I had some excellent West African study abroad students while teaching in the US, for example, who were consummate professionals and very serious (not uncommon for them to wear suits and ties to class!). More broadly, thanks to signaling and countersignaling I think you get a lot of cleavage between the culture and norms of a nation's elites and the behaviour of its mainstream culture, to the point where there are even inverse correlations (example: in my experience American international elites tend to be slimmer and fitter than their British or Irish equivalents, despite - or rather because of - the greater prevalence of obesity among working class Americans). All that said, you can't run a country with elites alone, so the culture of the general populace matters, and it's hard for me to watch EoD without feeling at least some pessimism about Congo's near-term development.

Consider then the Congolese day laborer, who makes no such assumptions. He lives in the jungle, where it is sometimes dangerous but usually warm and comfortable. Cold beer and decent food are solid pleasures.

This reminds me of the 'bee sting effect' as used by economists to understand the behaviour of people living in poverty. Imagine you have two people, A and B, and both have bee stings. Person A has 2 bee stings, and Person B has 6, and you can get each sting treated for $20 a pop. The idea is that Person A perversely is more likely to seek treatment, because there's a realistic pathway to being "bee sting free", whereas Person B might just drown their sorrows in booze or similar. A related phenomenon is why you're much more likely to get a dent fixed on your car if you only have one than if you have ten. With this in mind, you might think that your average Congolese day labourer has an extremely limited and precarious set of pathways to serious economic empowerment, whereas Lao has lots, and that this explains the difference in their behaviour, which as you say, might not be irrational.

There is a film, American Factory, about a Chinese factory attempt in Ohio.

I think I'll be watching this one tonight.

But this seems to discount marginal utility. Presumably an additional dollar to the poor is worth more than an additional dollar to the already well off?

Talking to some poor people from Romani community, this is not always the case. Poor families often organize themselves around clans. If one of them "makes it" there is implicit expectation of support for wider family/clan supposedly in exchange for higher status but also higher pressure and responsibility. Shit is complicated.

"Theodore Dalrymple" described the same pressures on black people in pre-Zimbabwe Rhodesia:

... salaries in Rhodesia were equal for blacks and whites doing the same job, so that a black junior doctor received the same salary as mine. But there remained a vast gulf in our standards of living, the significance of which at first escaped me; but it was crucial in explaining the disasters that befell the newly independent countries that enjoyed what Byron called, and eagerly anticipated as, the first dance of freedom.

The young black doctors who earned the same salary as we whites could not achieve the same standard of living for a very simple reason: they had an immense number of social obligations to fulfill. They were expected to provide for an ever expanding circle of family members (some of whom may have invested in their education) and people from their village, tribe, and province. An income that allowed a white to live like a lord because of a lack of such obligations scarcely raised a black above the level of his family. Mere equality of salary, therefore, was quite insufficient to procure for them the standard of living that they saw the whites had and that it was only human nature for them to desire—and believe themselves entitled to, on account of the superior talent that had allowed them to raise themselves above their fellows. In fact, a salary a thousand times as great would hardly have been sufficient to procure it: for their social obligations increased pari passu with their incomes.

and the same effects are at play in modern Senegal:

All the little stores in Senegal were owned by Mauritanians. If a Senegalese wanted to run a little store, he’d go to another country. The reason? Your friends and relatives would ask you for stuff for free, and you would have to say yes. End of your business. You are not allowed to be a selfish individual and say no to relatives. The result: Everyone has nothing.

And (though I don't have a source for this one) I've heard the same problem reported in multiple underclasses of the USA. If you have a sudden windfall and you save or invest it responsibly, then from that point until the point when you're broke again, any time a friend or family member asks if you can spare some cash, you have to choose between lying to them, telling the truth but then being seen as a heartless monster who won't share with them, or sharing and getting your savings drained away by them. In that context, blowing all your cash on a fancy new pickup truck (or whatever other splurge is appropriate to your particular subculture) isn't just foolish overconsumption, it's the closest you can get to actually saving money, by putting it into something that your community won't ask you to sell so you have money in your pocket to give them but that you could theoretically sell (albeit at a loss) if you needed money for a true emergency.

So anyway, it's not just a Romani problem (though you're not the first person I've read who reported it there). It seems to be almost a human universal that if you tell someone "he's not giving his money to friends and family" they see that as a moral failing, if you tell someone "he's not working harder to earn money for friends and family" they don't see that as an equivalent moral failing, and if you tell someone "those two attitudes combine to form an incentive mechanism that condemns whole cultures to poverty" ... well, it's better to try to explain differential equations to some people than game theory; they may not get it either way, but at least nobody looks at a Laplace transform and concludes that the mathematician explaining it must be evil.

For the very poor (especially, say, subsistence-farming peasants for whom a bad harvest may literally mean death) social capital is often significantly more valuable than actual capital (especially money). In a pre-industrial society there's nothing to invest in, and even nowadays you probably don't know how to invest because that kind of financial literacy isn't something people in your community have (which is why you get a lot of borderline or actual scams aimed at financially illiterate poor people). Being well-liked by your neighbors and being known as someone who will help out in a pinch earns you a degree of reciprocity.

It's not a cultural practice that is optimized for success in a post-industrial economy, but it works well enough and 2000 years ago worked better for most people than trying to save some cash so that the taxman or some bandits could take it instead.

All the little stores in Senegal were owned by Mauritanians. If a Senegalese wanted to run a little store, he’d go to another country.

Huh, you know...I saw this growing up and I never actually considered that the reason was that locals didn't want to own a store in their home town. Because some locals did.

My main assumption was simply that the Arabs supported one another: it seemed like they'd fund someone to come over with access to stock, they sold out and went home and were replaced by someone else.

Indians also have their hooks in a lot of these countries and, imo, it just beggars belief that no local wanted to open those businesses because they'd have family members begging for TVs. I assume a similar mechanism: Indians have links to buy these consumer goods that are manufactured or made back home or even in other countries.

That’s possibly an explanation for why Cajuns and East Indians do so much better for themselves outside of Acadianna/India, although selection effects also loom large.

That’s also why rural, working class men in the US own so many guns- they’re easy to turn into $500 for a true emergency at the pawn shop, but quite difficult to turn into $100 for your cousin in a very survivable tough spot. Spending your larger-than-expected bonus on buying a nice AR-15 is a reasonable response to living in conditions of being the largest earner in your immediate social circle.

"he's not working harder to earn money for friends and family" they don't see that as an equivalent moral failing

Isn't child support calculated based on the earning potential of the father? And he has to pay that amount, even if he is unemployed. So such logic isn't completely absent today, just quite rare.

Hmm... you're entirely right. I'd even say it's not rare, when you consider how it extends beyond child support. Alimony counts too, and so does working hard even when not divorced! Maybe the distinction is between "nuclear family" and "extended family"? A man who doesn't work harder when his wife and kids are in need is considered shameful, but is there any culture that shames a cousin for not putting in longer hours when his cousin is in need? I'd be surprised. First of all, there's a "why doesn't the recipient just work harder instead" question that applies to a friend or cousin more than to a child; second, it (perhaps uncharitably...) seems to me that the "you need to share what you have with the whole wide community" ethos has a lot of overlap with the "you don't get to have more by working harder, that's just a lie the Man uses to squeeze more profit out of you" ethos...

Yeah, I've seen this too, growing up.

Including the resentment shown in @Iconochasm's DMX lyric: because the system is implicit and not really systematized, it seems to work well generally but struggles when someone is atypically successful.

Because usually you only get demands from your own family or "clan" and they'll be relatively reasonable things; things poor people could help each other with. However, if you are prominent, larger groups of people (who have a much weaker claim but you nonetheless can't tell to go fuck themselves, not that sort of society) start making even more demanding appeals. You don't have to give it to them, but you do have to listen which causes enough stress on its own.

This comes up a lot in rap music, too.

Ain't never gave nothing to me (Yeah)

But every time I turn around

Cats got they hands out wantin' somethin' from me (Uh, huh)

I ain't got it, so you can't get it (Yeah)

Let's leave it at that 'cause I ain't with it (Yeah)

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